Managing Systems and Workgroups: A Guide for HP-UX System Administrators

Planning a Workgroup
Setting Disk-Management Strategy
Chapter 2 79
We repeated the experiment on another, much smaller system (32 MB
RAM) and got similar results, drawing the conclusion that a workstation
running these applications locally would need to have about 30 MB of
swap available, for a minimum of 70 MB configured swap.
In our particular situation, since we didn’t have a powerful application
server at the time, and did have several moderately powerful
workstations, we decided it made sense for us to import these
applications onto the workstations (via NFS mounts from our file server),
and accordingly we added file-system swap to those systems that looked
as if they would need it.
If you were to run such an experiment on a multiuser application server,
you would need to run as many copies of each application as would
actually be running at peak times, and would need to be a good deal less
simple-minded than we were in terms of the functions the applications
performed and the frequency and complexity of the samples.
Workstations
A workstation needs enough space on the local disk to hold the operating
system, plus sufficient swap for the workspace manager and whatever
applications will be running locally.
Plan on providing each workstation with at least a 1 GB disk. Both
HP-UX and NT workstations may be able to get by with 500 MB, but
barely, particularly if some sizeable applications are running locally (via
NFS or from the local disk); see “Swap” on page 77.
Disk-Management Tools
This section provides a brief summary of the disk-management tools
HP-UX provides; for details see “Administering a System: Managing
Disks and Files” on page 555.
Logical Volume Manager (LVM)
LVM is the most common disk-management method for current versions
of HP-UX on all platforms. As of release 10.20, it is the default on Series
800 systems (except those installed with a root disk smaller than 1GB),
and is required on Series 700 systems whose root disk is larger than
2GB.